That’s BDSM for short,
and a fertile ground for unsavory types to take advantage of sweet innocents.

All judging and secret
thoughts of kinky danger aside, for many people BDSM is just an edgy concept
that excites them to explore physical or emotional limits. How edgy, depends on
how much you want to push. As a submissive, do you trust your Dominant to
take you safely on a path that won’t scar you -- but instead will be
borderline-euphoric?

We know BDSM to be a
lifestyle of choice for so many SL residents because they think we can pursue
the passions that come with that experience more conveniently, or safely.

Perhaps.

How much safer can we pursue a BDSM lifestyle
in SL than in RL?

“In SL you can poof,
but in real life you cannot,” explains Master Jae Avedon of Power Pleasure
Passion. “And there are also laws on physical pain in reality, that don’t
necessarily apply in SL. There is a lot of mental pain in SL. We tend to deal
with that.”

Pleasure Power Passion
(abbreviated P3) is a sim group that does the subject of BDSM justice, lending
a cerebral air of credibility to an often misunderstood space. The SL
Enquirer had a chance to interview key members of the group on the subject of
role playing safety. And while somehow making all of his P3 constituents more
than comfortable, Master Jae controlled the interview as you would expect a
true Dominant could.

In Second Life, just
as in reality, there’s more to BDSM than just one role player’s liking to order
other role players around. And there is more to Dominant/submissive
relationships than transfer of pain, or risk.

TRUST

“A Dominant knows a
submissive will never use her safe word,” says Mrs. Zam Tibbits also of P3.

On the subject of
pursuing that trust, safely, the members of P3 know how to address various perils
head-on.

“We kind of deal
mostly with the Dominant / submissive relationship. D/s light,” says Master
Jae. After some thorough matchmaking, “Submissives go off with their
Dominant, and the Dominant sets the relationship. Trust gets applied over time.
The Dominant evaluates how well his submissive reacts to stimuli along the way.
That’s one way we go.”

The other way is more
provocative. In the sim’s most risqué offering, submissive and sim owner Tricia
Velde brokers the auction of other submissives to their prospective
Dominants. “The female has total control of when she is sold to a
male. Everything goes through Tricia. All communication and
meetings are brokered through Tricia,” explains Master Jae while elaborating on
the element of safety involved.

Carosell, P3 event
coordinator, respects how the group deals with predators in particular.
Master Jae expanded on that point for her by taking a sanity check beyond the
confines of SL’s metaverse; “Predators in SL are phishing. We call them Financial
Dominants. Look, we don’t know who these people (in RL) are.”

It’s that kind of
rationalization across SL and RL that makes P3 work so well to address the
topic of safety, and ultimately makes the group so successful with its members.

P3 asks people looking
to enter into relationships to go through a variety of interview stages.
Members answer questions and provide ratings for their limits on various
subjects on a scale of 0 - 5, and are then matched by a matchmaking process.

So the sim offers a
variety of paring processes and opportunities to make certain relationships get
courted safely.

Other elements of the
P3 group include a library with original theses on the subject of BDSM
roleplay. There are also classes and social groups for submissives and
Dominants. Subtle details factoring safety abound within the group activities;
including permitting submissives to attend Dominants workshops so that they
learn more about Dominants in their relationships -- but also not allowing
Dominants to join workshops for submissives so that submissives can be
protected in an environment that encourages them to openly learn and
participate. That being said, “submissives are encouraged to not be rooks
and rollover,” adds Mrs. Tibbits.

The group at Pleasure Power
Passion likes to think by actively teaching points on loyalty, joy,
communication, trust, honesty, respect, and forgiveness that they approach the
topic of BDSM with a fair bit of safety. All the sim processes, information,
chat sessions, and classes the group hosts are ways to get everyone involved in
this space safely. If you are at all curious to pursue the topic further,
and safely, attend one of their group sessions or read up on the subject in the
P3 library found via the link below.